Cooler Master MasterWatt 650

Up close, design improvements and video

Cooler Master's new MasterWatt range is designed to offer a balance between performance, reliability and price, with this 650W variant coming in at £64.99 in the UK with a five-year warranty.

This PSU comes with 80+ Bronze levels of efficiency, making it less efficient than many higher-end power supplies but at least 82% efficient when it is between 20% and 100% loads.

Lower levels of efficiency will have an impact on your electric bill over time, though depending on your location or time on your PC this may not be a major concern, what should be noted however is that more efficient PSUs produce less heat and can often run in a fanless state at higher loads, cutting down on potential system noise.

Cooler Master backs up this unit with a five-year warranty, which is a long time when considering the lifespan (or upgrade cycle) of most custom gaming systems.

One of the first major upgrades that Cooler Master's new MasterWatt 650 series offers is improved cabling when compared to the company's older GM-series of PSUs, offering all-black cables instead of the standard ketchup and mustard variety cables of yesteryear.

This improves the look of this PSU in a big way, making the systems it is used with a lot more pleasing to the eye, especially when looking at areas like the motherboard's 20+4-pin cable, where these cables are often most visible.

Cooler Master has also increased the lengths of several cables for their MasterWatt series, offering PCIe cables that are 14% longer than previous generations while also offering more conductive PCIe cables for increased efficiency for GPU power delivery.

Aesthetically, Cooler Master's MasterWatt series of PSUs are a standard "black box" affair, coming with a 120mm Silencio fan for cooling and a very minimalistic aesthetic overall. This fan in another upgrade over Cooler Master's older GM series, offering a quieter noise profile and the ability to turn off entirely when the PSU is under 15% loading.

As you can see this unit comes with several cables pre-installed, the 20+4 pin motherboard connection and a 4+4-pin EPS/CPU connection, which are two standard connections that all modern systems use. These two cables have no need to be passive, with a direct connection helping to increase the power efficiency of this unit.

This semi-modular PSU will come with five optional cables, with three accessories pin-outs and two 8-pin PCIe pin-outs.

As you can see in the images both above and below this unit is designed to be run in a fan-down configuration, presenting a neat looking Cooler Master MasterWatt logo on the window-facing side of a system. The top of the unit in this configuration is completely blank, giving this PSU a stealthy appearance.

When used in a fan facing up config, users will be able to see a PSU certification sticker on the side of the unit, which reveals many of the PSU's in-depth specifications. This sticker will look ugly if it is visible in your system, forcing us to recommend a fan-facing-down PSU configuration.

Cables

This 650W unit comes with a 20+4-pin and a 4+4-pin EPS connection on the PSU at stock, with five different cables acting as optional cables for use with GPUs, SSDs, HDDs and other accessories.

All modular cables on this unit come with all-black flat ribbon-style cables, with two cables that come with dual 6+2-pin PCIe power cables, two cables that come with four SATA power connections and a single cable that offers a single SATA connection, three Molex connections and a single floppy power connection.

Please note that this is the cable configuration of the MasterWatt 650, so the exact cable configuration could differ in higher wattage and lower wattage variants.

Conclusion

What the Cooler Master MasterWatt series offers is a great balance between performance, pricing and reliability, shipping with a five-year warranty and several upgrades over Cooler Master's older offerings in this price range.

When compared to the GM-series that it replaces this unit comes with all-black cables, longer, more conductive PCIe cables and the addition of a Silencio fan for quieter operation and a semi-passive fan profile that turns the fan off at low loads.

To make a long story short this PSU offers everything that a budget PC builder needs, with the only real downside being the unit's efficiency rating. That being said that is what comes with high wattage units at this price point, with higher efficiency ratings often coming with significant price increases.

The PSU is the core of any system, making it important to purchase the correct unit for your needs. The Cooler Master MasterWatt series presents a compelling low-cost offering, though high-end builders should be looking at higher-end units if they value efficiency, higher-end 0dB fan modes and the increased stability that top tier PSUs can offer.

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